We went to their membership class last night and they gave us a meal of breaded pork chops, mashed potatoes, side salad and on and on... This church feeds everyone on Wednesday night! Pretty amazing amount of work to go through!
The church has some really cool aspects about it. We attend the contemporary service. The church is in "snowbird" country but is obviously not dependent on them for attendance sake.
The pastors are from Tennessee Temple, yet went to Southern Baptist seminaries. As I mentioned before, all of the periphery (music, friendliness and facilities) are at the bottom of our list. It is difficult to find a church where the pastors intentionally use the Bible and get the meaning across.
The pastor of the contemporary service uses Scripture and you have to go back to it again and again during the preaching. We LOVE the music, so we get our cake AND frosting!
The church is not overtly Reformed/Calvinistic in its doctrine. From the teaching and preaching, there is certainly an emphasis on God's sovereignty, more so than I expected from TTU grads. Two of my profs at seminary (DBTS) were teaching at TTU when the senior pastor was there... so I have yet to have that discussion.
We desperately need a church and didn't want to just "settle." This seems to be a great option and we have really dug deep into a bunch of churches in this area.
So... at this point in our lives... we are now Southern Chicken Fried Baptists
